LOCAL VIEW —Wake-robin—(updated)

(Photo credit Jeffrey S. Pippen  Excellent pictures at http://www.jeffpippen.com/plants/trillium.htm )

Not that robins need waking. Usually they are the ones waking me. However usually they stop mobbing about as rather rowdy gangs, and break into couples, around this time, and as they do their winter alarm-chirps give way to their choruses of territorial song. Someone at some point must have gotten poetic and decided that the flowers awoke the songs, if not the birds themselves.

This year spring has been so delayed that the robin’s singing started well before the wake-robin flowers popped up through the brown leaves of the forest floor. Therefore I had to fall back on a second sign of spring, which is the return of the swallows. That seems to be determined by the sun in some places,  and there are tales of swallows coming north and finding no bugs to eat and starving, but I like to think our swallows are smarter than that. As soon as I see them I expect to start being bitten by a third sign of spring, black flies.

In any case, I saw my first open red trillium yesterday, and my first tree swallows, and therefore the plant should be renamed wake-swallow.

Tree swallows are beautiful, and entrance me with their mid-air antics. I just wish they didn’t have such frowning, grumpy faces. I reckon it has something to do with a diet of bugs, bugs, bugs, all the live-long day.

Credit: http://www.birdsamore.com/byb/swallow-tree.htm

 Photo credit Laura Meyers  (This gal does an amazing job of catching birds in unusual poses. I recommend her site at http://www.laurameyers.com/ )

Another great picture, with the credit to https://whyevolutionistrue.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/tree-swallow.jpg

I’ll add to this post later, but need to run to work.

*******

 It was a gray, raw morning, with temperatures barely above 40°, and cold northeast winds off the winter-chilled Atlantic.  We’ve been waiting for the stalled low pressure squatting morbidly up by Nova Scotia to move out, but now that it finally looks like budging another storm comes diving south through the still-ice-dotted Great Lakes.

The odd thing was that, despite the rawness, it remained dry. There wasn’t more than the slightest sprinkle during the gloomy day. The diving storm plunged so far to the south it went under us, and headed out to sea.

I breathed a sigh of relief, as it seemed like a close call. All it would take is some rain to start falling, and temperatures in the 40°s drop to the 30°s, as the rain drags down cold air, and the next thing you know wet snow starts mixing in.

As it was the power of the sun started to be felt, despite the overcast, and temperatures rose up to the 50°s (From 5° up to 13° Celsius). The first peas sprouted in the garden.  And, at long last, the forsythia flowers started unfolding. Usually they blossom around April 15 around here.

It’s hard to be gloomy, even on a gloomy day, when those happy yellows appear.

ARCTIC SEA-ICE THICKENING (April 29, 2015)

The PIOMAS project attempts to measure the “volume” of the arctic sea-ice.  This is difficult and has been an elusive piece of data to obtain, and the PIOIMAS project is critisized for various reasons, but likely is our best attempt so far. I find the above graph interesting for it suggests the sea-ice has been thickening the past few years. (The current year is the red line.)

Of course, “average thickness” is a bit of a ridiculous concept, as the thickness of the ice varies greatly. The Laptev Sea, which exports a lot of ice due to winds howling off shore from Siberia, can have open water when it is -40°, and often has only a skim of ice less than a foot thick which will melt easily in the summer sunshine, but all that exported sea-ice tends to be carried by cross-polar flow and crunch up against the north coast of Canada, where the ice can be twenty feet thick.

The PIOMAS “volume” is determined by gathering data involving thickness and data involving area, and doing the simple equation that gives you volume, and it too shows the recent years have seen an increase, and the the Pole is failing to become ice free.

None of this really addresses the issue of whether the ice will last, for thick ice doesn’t mean much if it is in Fram Strait. Such ice will be blown down the east coast of Greenland and be melted in the Atlantic in mere months. Meanwhile thick ice north of Canada is caught in the Polar Gyre which will rotate it around the Pole, and can keep it around for more than five years.

However it is important to note that volume has increased despite the fact the extent of ice at the minimum was at its lowest levels ever, in recent times.

Now, if the area is less but the volume is more, it suggests that the ice that remains is thicker and more solid and more able to resist melting. This may explain why the “peak” of the arctic ice extent graph was so flat, and took so long to begin falling.

In fact the NOAA prediction of ice extent is even suggesting that the ice will reach above normal levels by mid July.

All in all, it looks bad for people who bet the Pole would be ice-free by the summer of 2015. It is especially hard on people who gambled to a degree where they started farms on Greenland. Such people do exist, and it sours them when there is no sign of the “Death Spiral.”

NOTE  FURTHER INFORMATION, PLUS SOME SCATHING CRITICISM, CAN BE FOUND WITHIN A EXCELLENT, CONCISE OVERVIEW AT

 https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/arctic-ice-the-same-as-10-years-ago/

LOCAL VIEW —Filthy—

My weekend was basically consumed by removing -bleep- from my system, and this morning no one could say I was “full of it.” I had an colonoscopy done, and the initial  news is good. The polyps are of the “low suspicion” sort, and unless the doctor is surprised by the biopsy results I won’t have to go through this experience again for five years.

Despite the fact I am working hard on becoming a cantankerous anachronism, I don’t want to be one of those old fossils who belabors listeners with details of their bodily decay. Aging may be a fairly interesting phenomenon to witness if it is happening to you, but it bores the daylights out of younger folk, who want to cruise about in their physical bodies without dwelling on the fact that even the finest car eventually needs to be traded in, and even a Lamborghini will someday be a rust bucket in a junk yard. Life is for living, and if you dwell too much on death you are in a sense dwelling on the physical.

One of the Christian saints wrote with a skull on his desk, to remind himself that physical things don’t last and spirit matters, but that is quite different from being morbid. People full of spirit are more alive, and have a real zest for life, and even when losing hair and teeth find things to talk about besides losing hair and teeth. (What animates saints most is the topic of “life eternal”.)

In any case, I found it a real drag to have my entire weekend dragged down to the level of poop. I really do not find my anus all that interesting, but they make you drink an entire gallon of stuff that flushes out your digestive tract, and in the process I had to contemplate my anus much more than I am used to. Being a poet, and prone to making a poem out of everything, I wrote a sonnet about my anus. Would you like to hear it?

I didn’t think so. Most of us don’t want to think about crud, which is why doctors get paid so much to deal with it for us. My Dad was a surgeon who used to say surgery was little more than plumbing, with some sewing thrown in, and he didn’t see why people didn’t save money and take out their own appendixes. He said men should be ashamed for being gutless, even to a degree where they would let their beloved sweetheart die, if there was no surgeon around to do the cesarean.

The fact of the matter is that guts are gross, and we are gutless because we want to be something other than gross. Sewers attract few of us, which may be why plumbers make as much as surgeons these days (once you subtract the huge malpractice insurance doctors pay). We, who want to fly up in the clouds where the birdies tweet, wind up paying a high price for our avoidance.

Therefore I figure I should be congratulated for not avoiding my colonoscopy.  I could have easily put it off for yet another year, but the experiences of a friend convinced me not to, and I lowered myself to sewer stuff.

That actually is a spiritual thing to do. Not that I did it for spiritual reasons. I did it to avoid colon cancer, and to pamper my totally selfish lust for living. However I accidentally did a spiritual thing, which is to stop preferring the worldly high to the worldly low. I went to a low state, and by sheer coincidence was like Mother Teresa going to the slums of Calcutta, or like Jesus washing the reeking feet of a stinking leper.

You can blame the drugs they gave me if you want, but I honestly felt a lot better afterwards. You can say it was only because in all probability I wont have to do it again for five years,  and I was merely heaving a big sigh of relief, but I honestly feel something else was involved. It was like I’d accidentally walked into a spiritual sunbeam.

We are all yearning for a truly spring-like sunbeam here in New Hampshire, as the weather continues to behave like it is March though the sun is as high as it is in August. Rather than lows moving away from Labrador to afflict England, England gets lovely sunshine as the Labrador lows back up to Nova Scotia.

The above maps show that the true spring has been pushed all the way south to the cold front in Florida, and the only way we can get any semblance of spring is when cold north winds from the four-feet-deep snow-pack over Quebec is replaced by slightly less cold air from the cold Atlantic around Nova Scotia.

Not that spring can be denied. It is happening, in a painfully slow manner. We will have to mow our lawns soon, as damnable grass grows even when buds wont burst. And I did see a single, lonely forsythia flower was open today, and the wake-robin are pushing up through the leaves in the woods.

But it is far from what we want. We want blue birds and blue skies and bluebells,  not the blues. We want skip about tittering like elves, and not to face days like Mother Theresa facing Calcutta.

I’ve been thinking hard about what it is that old, wrinkled. prune-faced saint-lady could see that I can’t see. Mother Theresa was so full of life she could turn a slum into a church, while I’m having a hard time turning my church into a church. Where Mother Theresa saw Oneness, I have an amazing ability to create schisms.

I have trouble seeing Oneness, as the world is constantly confronting me with opposites. Some situations strike me as blue sky, and some situations strike me as pure poop. I am forever comparing. Communists vs Capitalists. Old vs Young. Rich vs Poor. Educated vs Uneducated. Men vs Woman. Spiritual vs Nonspiritual. Global Warming Alarmists vs Global Warming Skeptics. And on and on and on it goes. I am tired of it all. Where is the peace of oneness, when you always have to take a side?

I once might have renounced this world and retreated to the Himalayas and become a Buddhist,  but even the peaceful Buddhists get no peace these days. The world gives them no rest. In Afghanistan the Islamic militants blow up their huge, beautiful, ancient statues of Buddha, (which is a bit like someone blowing up our Statue of Liberty). When they fled to the high plateau of Tibet, the communists came marching in from China. And when they now flee from Tibet to Nepal, a force 7.9 earthquake flattens their villages. We live in an age when you cannot escape the world. It is after you, and somehow you need to fight back.

As soon as you fight, you are taking sides. It is the end of the peace of Oneness, and makes you hurt in your gut. It is like siding with your mother against your father, or siding with your father against your mother, in a divorce. No matter where you stand, you are failing to honor your parents, and something deep down inside knows what you do is wrong.

It is now nearly 50 years since the answer appeared from, all bizarre things, pop radio: All you need is Love.

However, after nearly 50 years of failure, watching efforts to improve society only plant and breed further and worse schisms, I’m resorting to the second best thing after Love, which is humor.

It does no good to tell others to love if you can’t do it yourself. It does no good to demand others practice Oneness if you yourself are divisive. It is better to be honest, and confess your complete and utter failure. Rather than the blue sky, you are filth. However this is a real drag, unless you reduce pretentiousness to absurdity, and knock St. Paul off his high horse with humor.

Because it was my turn to give a message at my dying church, I figured the best way to point out how absurd Christians are, when they make a schism, where Jesus required Oneness, was to point at myself, and make a joke of myself. However humor is a dangerous thing, and people sometimes don’t laugh. Even though the congregation is tiny, I was sweating a few bullets as I spoke something like this:

“When I think about it, it seems people more often use commandments to resist progress, than they use commandments to push themselves outside of their “comfort zones”. This has led me into an interesting series of sidetracks, as I prepared this message. I began to look around at various objects in my house, and to wonder when they were invented, and to wonder if the inventor got in trouble, and was scolded by people who resist progress.

One of the first things I looked at was soap, which led to some absurd thinking. This happened because, when I came trudging up the front steps after a hard day’s work, all I wanted was to sit down at my computer and zone out, but my wife did not thank me for my hard work and welcome me home. Instead she told me not to track manure all over her clean floors. That didn’t seem very welcoming to me

My wife then not only asked me to take my shoes off on the porch, but also asked me take my jacket off, because it was covered in soot and engine oil. Then I looked down at the knees of my jeans. I saw they were caked with about a quarter inch of dirt from the garden. It seemed I might even be asked to take my pants off, before entering the front door of my own house. This soured my mood, and I became petulant and muttered, “Whoever it was that invented clean floors should be tarred and feathered.”

Then, after a long, hot, and soapy shower, I sat down at my computer and researched the subject of soap. I discovered something very interesting: The ancient Israelites didn’t use soap. Soap… Is…Not…Biblical!

It seems the Israelite’s way of washing was to rinse themselves with water, anoint themselves with oil, and then use a sort of spatula thingy to scrape the oil off their skin. This was also done in ancient Greece and Rome, and the Romans looked down their noses at the barbarians to the north, who used soap. But who invented soap?

It turned out soap was actually a Babylonian invention. Even the saying, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”, is not from the Bible, and actually is a Babylonian proverb. This gave me some good ammunition to use against my wife. The next time she asked me to wipe my feet, I could growl, “Oh don’t be such a Babylonian.” Yup, I could do that….if I dared.

I confess this absurdity to you to demonstrate how ridiculous I can be; when it comes to saying I am Biblical and other people are not. However I’m not the only one who behaves this way.”

I think that says a lot, concerning who is filthy. And to my great delight, my humor didn’t get me tarred and feathered. Everyone laughed at all the right places.

In some ways I wish I could have died right then and there. For one thing, it would have avoided the next step of preparing for my colonoscopy, which involved spending four hours on a toilet, contemplating my anus.   For another thing, it would have avoided having to have the pleasant drugs wear off after the procedure, and face a world that seems determined to have us all live life at its worst, rather than life at its best.

Is there a single type of government that is based on Oneness?  Even democracy, which is best and has God in its guts, has a majority ruling over a minority, which is a schism and creates problems.

Our situation is hopeless. What we need is Oneness Himself to come riding a white horse down like a thunderbolt from the blue sky, to show us how what is blatantly obvious is politically feasible.

People have been waiting and waiting, a long, long time. How long have Jews awaited their Messiah? How long have Christians awaited their Savior? How long has Islam awaited the Rasool?  How long have Hindus and Buddhists awaited the Avatar?

It is not enough to just sit like a bump on a log waiting. If schism, divorce, apartheid and alienation are so obviously negative, and so obviously a sewer of filth, it seems blatantly obvious that love and humor are better.  I don’t care if they are not what bankers approve of. They are worth a try.

LOCAL VIEW –For Missus and For Sythia–

Photo Credit:  http://www.instesre.org/TemperateClimate/TemperateClimate.htm

This past week has seen a reversion to wintry weather, with frost on the windshields and ice in the puddles. The budding trees have hit the brakes, and the ponds have gone nearly silent.

Back when the weather was more kindly, on April 16, I heard the first frogs, which are not the spring peepers but another small frog I’ve heard called “banjo frogs” (perhaps because they make a “Twank” sound,  a bit like a breaking banjo string). (The Australian frog with the same name actually sounds more like a banjo.) I call them “spring quackers” because they also sound a bit like ducks. They are lower and quieter than peepers, and always seem to beat the peepers by a day or two, when it comes to announcing the ponds are coming back to life. They are far less obvious than the peepers are. Where the peepers peep is piercing and shrill, the quackers are more of a low muttering, almost subliminal.

At our childcare I asked a small girl, around age three, if she could hear them, and at first she shook her head. Then her eyes changed, and she tilted her head, and looked off curiously through the trees. I asked her if she’d like to sneak closer, and she nodded. (Most kids like to sneak.) Then we crept through the pines, and it was wonderful to watch the child’s face fill with wonder as we drew closer and the plaintive “twanking” became more obvious. However then my idiot dog came lunging through the underbrush, plunging along the side of the pond to see what we were up to, and the frogs immediately became silent and the water ahead was dimpled with rings of ripples. I told the girl my dog wasn’t very good at sneaking, and she nodded.

By the next day the peepers had started their shrieking, and all the subtlety was lost.  They demand attention, which doesn’t seem a very good survival strategy, until you sneak up on them and understand they confuse predators by being both numerous and deafening. It is hard to locate a single frog by its peep, with so many other peeps coming at you from all angles. And they also become immediately silent, if you move too fast. I find them amazingly difficult to locate. They are also amazingly loud, once you see how small they are.

(Photo credit: Mike Marchand.)

They also can stand being frozen solid, due to some sort of antifreeze in their blood. This was a good thing, as the promise of spring seemingly became a lie.

Just as the first frogs are tiny, so are the first blooms on the swamp maples, which are the first tree to bud out. The lowlands go from being silvery thickets to being touched by a raspberry mist I have yet to see captured by a photograph, but you have to poke your nose close to see how lovely the individual flowers are.

(Photo credit: https://piedmontgardener.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/maple-flowers-and-buds.jpg )

Ours are a bit more purple than the the flowers pictured above, and they look a lot worse after they’ve been blasted by frost. I’m going to watch, to see if they make many seeds this year.  We got into a northwest flow on Tuesday that wouldn’t quit, and were still in it on Friday.

A few flakes were in the roaring wind on Wednesday, and Thursday’s purple clouds kept pelting us with white, Dr. Seuss pompoms of  fluffy hail called “graupel”, and Friday morning began with a whirling flurry that briefly made the view look like January, though it never stuck to the ground. It was not weather conducive to ambition, in the garden, which turned out to be a good thing, for my  wife had other ambitions.

I wound up repairing the fence in front of the house, as the winter’s plows trashed what little was left of the old one. I fear I spend so much time over at the farm that I neglect my home, and the lack of care shows, and annoys my wife. The Memorial Day parade comes down Main Street and passes right in front of our house, and my wife doesn’t believe me when I say all eyes are on the parade and not our house. Consequently I spend time every spring at home, sprucing the place up, right when I feel I should be gardening.

There actually was a parade this morning, but as usual I always forget it, and get a shock. At the start of the baseball season the children are marched from the fire station to the ball field with blaring fire engines and police cars, and every year I think it is a terrorist attack.

After watching my grandson in his first game my ambition was to nap, but my middle son has the ambition to grow pear trees and see if he can start a microbrewery making a sort of pear cider called “perry”.  This is a long-term project, but in the short term involves planting four trees at the childcare, and also involves controlling my goats, so they don’t eat his saplings. This in turn involved repairing the electric fence, so that is what I wound up doing rather than snoozing.  Rather than rested I wound up feeling as you’d expect, after fighting with cold wire in a cold wind.

My ambition is now to simply survive until noon Monday. Sunday will not be a day of rest for me, as I am giving the sermon at our church. We have dwindled to a size so small that, fort the first time in 265 years, we can’t afford a pastor or interim pastor, and instead have “guest speakers” which includes our selves, (as we are cheapest) (IE free). We don’t call our sermons sermons, but rather call them “messages”, but mine will be a sermon all right.

My “message” is liable to be grouchy, as I have to fast on clear fluids, and then later in the day flush out my system and spend a lot of my time on the toilet, as my doctor wants to have a look inside my colon first thing Monday morning. It is hard to be happy about this prospect. A man of my advanced years expects to be treated with more dignity than that, especially right after giving a sermon at church.

It is also hard to see much prospect of Spring busting out.  We need south winds, as we are surrounded by cold in other directions. The Great Lakes still have ice, and there is still an amazing four feet of snow not all that far to our north. (The purple areas in the Dr Ryan Maue map below, from Joseph D’Aleo’s site at Weatherbell.)

It is hard to see much hope in the current map, with the warm rains suppressed so far to the south.

 However with the sun as high as it is in mid-August, spring is only seemingly denied. This morning, even with a skim of ice on puddles, when a beam of sun pooled in the east-facing shallows of the pond, a single peeper let out a solitary yelp. And I remind myself the ice was still thick enough to walk upon, on April first. Things have melted; spring isn’t denied.

The buds only seem on hold. Trees are very smart, for a being without brains, and they know when to bust out all over. The forsythia is yellower every day, even without blooming, and, even as I stood sulking by my garden yesterday, a bluebird landed on a fence-post nearby. It’s hard to argue with that.

POSTSCRIPT

The “spring quackers” are officially called “wood frogs”, and sound like this:

LOCAL VIEW –Daffodils Drenched–(updated)

( Photo credit: http://awaytogarden.com/bulb-growing-basics-a-springtime-recap/ )

Glancing through google images I couldn’t find a single picture, among hundreds of daffodils, of one drooping in the rain., so then I plugged in “drooping daffodils” and did a bit better.

I suppose people are simply less inclined to take pictures of flowers in the rain, when the flowers are getting pounded down. People equate spring with blue skies. However every spring daffodils are in a hurry to spring up before the trees can shade them with leaves, and every year they get drubbed by downpours, and then droop downcast in the drizzle.

We did get drenched by a fairly vigorous southwest flow ahead of a sprawling storm over the Great Lakes, which has kicked a secondary low up the coast. Once again thunder made it north to Boston, but not up to our hills. It never seems quite spring to me until we get a roll of thunder, and the rain did begin as sleet yesterday (and is still sleeting in Northern Maine).

(I’ll add more later, but have to run to work right now.)

*******

I found out there was thunder last night, but I slept through it.

I also noticed I myself was drooping like the daffodils. Partly it is a continuation of the post-taxes hang-over. It is a sort of “what’s the use of trying” mentality, born of the government’s greed, and its desire to take money and liberty away.

However, when I thought about it, it was an older feeling as well, a feeling I could recall from my youth, though usually it didn’t hit me until May. At first I’d be hit by wild ambition, and only later would the “what’s the use of trying” discouragement set in.

The first stanza of a poem I wrote in 1975 came bouncing through my head, and made me smile, and I added three more stanzas.

In the spring there’s more to do
Than the clock allows you to.
There’s a thousand different things you want to plant.
Although lazy with spring fever
You try working like a beaver
And attempt to keep a schedule you can’t.

Though your garden plans are brilliant
You will wonder where your will went
Once you leave your golden castles in the air.
All too soon your mind’s accosted
By your body’s, “I’m exhausted!”
What you’re growing is depression and despair.

Therefore interrupt your planning.
Cross out freezing. Cross out canning.
Cross out many months of toil for which you’re wishing.
While the garden soil you’re turning
Stoop and pluck the worms there squirming
And plop them in a can and plan some fishing.

Once you plan for some relaxing
You will quit the overtaxing
That can make the crop you grow a bitter harvest.
To avoid the groans you’ve grown
You must plant not bread alone
But also plant the songs and poems that are best.

That is some advice for myself. Now we shall see if I can practice what I preach, and follow my own advice.

LOCAL VIEW –Awaiting the Wet–

We have a flood watch this morning, which seems slightly absurd as it is so dry I’ve have to risk arrest to burn the dead weeds in my garden. (The trick is to burn small patches, so by the time anyone smells smoke the quick blaze is out, and you are whistling innocently and planting seeds.)

I got 40 feet of spinach planted yesterday. Actually it is 80 feet, as I plant a double row, with the rows around six inches apart. Once the seeds come up I thin the plants so they are four to six inches apart, (using the thinnings in a salad). Then the trick is to make sure the spinach gets lots of water, and lots of nitrogen. I have a nice pile of rotted manure, (which the old-timers called “brown gold”), and top-dress the plants away from the stalks. (If the manure is placed too close to the plants they get overfed and turn yellow.)  What you want is the plants to grow at top speed, before the weather gets hot and they bolt.

After spending around fifty years thinking spinach was loaded with iron, and was good for me, I recently learned it also is loaded with oxalate, which binds with the iron and makes it so your body can’t use it. Therefore I’m simply growing it because I like it.

Anyway, half of the time, when you learn of a new scientific study that shows some nourishing thing isn’t nourishing, you later learn that scientific study was done by someone who benefits if sales of that nourishing thing slump.  Both eggs and milk have spent time on the not-good-for-you list, only to be removed later. It wouldn’t surprise me if the study showing Spinach didn’t supply as much iron as previously thought was done by the Broccoli Growers Association.

One thing that is fairly certain is that the fresher a food is, the more nutritious it is.  You don’t want to pick spinach and leave it in the refrigerator for a couple of days. If possible you want to pick it just before dinner.

I’m also trying to grow some Onions from seed, which I’ve never tried before. Usually I plant little bulbs. I have ten feet of sweet onions and fifteen feet of Spanish onions involved in this experiment.

Usually the soil is muddy in April, but not yesterday. A bit of rain wouldn’t be a bad thing.

One reason for the flood watch is that the rivers and streams are fairly high, despite the drought. This is partly due to the snow-melt, but is also due to something I noticed happens during very cold winters. The level of lakes rises five inches. This occurs simply because the ice gets to be 50 inches thick, and a tenth of an iceberg floats above water, and that lifts the level of the lake a tenth of 50 inches, which is 5 inches. The “top of the water” can be five inches above the level of the outlet, yet not a drop can flow out, as the water is all frozen. As recently as April 1 we were walking on very solid ice on the ponds, but now it has vanished, under sunshine which beats down from the same point in the sky the sun is at in the middle of August. It’s amazing how quickly the ice just fades away, and then the extra five inches of water in the ponds can flow out the outlets, and the creeks and streams and rivers all rise even in a drought.

The snow is gone here, but there is likely more snow left to the north, and up on higher hills, and the weather service wants to cover its butt, when it issues the current flood watch, at a time the soil is getting dry and my seeds could use a bit of rain.

NOVEL’S TEASER –PART 12–

This is a continuation of a story that began at: https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/teaser-to-a-novel/

Part 2 can be found at:   https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/novels-teaser-part-2/

Part 3 can be found at:  https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/novels-teaser-part-3/

Part 4 can be found at:  https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/novels-teaser-part-4/

Part 5 can be found at:   https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/novels-teaser-part-5/

Part 6 can be found at  https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/novels-teaser-part-6/

Part 7 can be found at: https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/novels-teaser-part-7/

Part 8 can be found at https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/novels-teaser-part-8/

Part 9 can be found at https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/novels-teaser-part-9/

Part 10 can be found at https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/9227/

Part 11 can be found at https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/novels-teaser-part-11/

NOTE:  During the year 1972 I shifted from thinking that marijuana and hallucinogens should be legalized to being zealously opposed to legalization. The change occurred because I made a distinction between drugs such as caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, which effected lower parts of the brain and were “only” harmful physically, emotionally and mentally, and drugs such as marijuana and hallucinogens which also effected higher parts of the brain, and were harmful physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

This distinction is based on the premise that besides a physical brain we have a non-physical mind superimposed over the brain’s flesh, and that certain functions of the physical brain occur at a sort of tangent point between the physical and non-physical, and should not be meddled with.

I have become more gentle towards a new generation that now struggles with drugs, but I still feel cannabis is far more harmful than alcohol. However in writing this work I have to remember the way I thought back when I and my friends naively believed what we were told: Namely, that such harmful drugs were “expanding our consciousness”.

SYNOPSIS  

The American “Nig” has returned after a year abroad at a strict school in Scotland, and is writing the South African “Kaff”, using a shorthand the two teenagers devised which allows them to write with the speed of their frenetic thoughts.

Nig has been dismayed by changes that have occurred in the USA while he was away, and at this point is telling Kaff he has decided to make a lot of money selling lyrics for hit songs, and to buy a plot of land he calls “The Party Woods.” He plans to form a commune of his boyhood friends, but needs to convince his friends the scheme is possible.

What Nig is attempting to do is to figure out how to “get the gang together”, but his friends have gone in different directions, and the unity which the gang once shone with seems lost. Nig is attempting to end this divorce by being an amazing psychiatrist who can solve all problems with a single session. He imagines he makes progress in the magical atmosphere of the “Party Woods”, but that out in the world he faces opposition to the unity of a commune..

At this point in Nig’s description he has concluded a discussion with Ham and Franks, who are two brothers who have become ardent communists, and another discussion with his boyhood best-friend Durf, who has lost faith in society and practices a sort of self-centered epicureanism at a commune of his own in the city, and Nig is now midst a discussion out in the Party Woods with his depressed friend “Spook” and his brother “Zooks”,  who are two of the four Lasaumille brothers.

*******

Both Spook and Zooks seemed to know without saying that we were going to sit and talk on the vibe-place outcropping where we did so much talking, during my Senior Summer, cos that’s where they went and sat down. I sat beside them, with my legs dangling over the edge, a big old smile pasted across my face cos they looked so much like themselves.

Zooks lay down on the rock as if the scattered spots of pale, green lichen on the dark, bare granite were actually thick moss. He’s just a guy who likes to be comfortable, and I think that guy could get comfortable even if he was laying in thorns. His head was propped up on an elbow, and he launched into some really comfortable recollections, talking about how different the view had become. All the maples below were skinny and around twenty or twenty-five feet tall. That’s around twelve years old, and Zooks is sixteen, so he could remember sitting up on his Dad’s shoulders up on that outcropping, looking down on a meadow that had just been hayed. He could also remember playing in the thick puckerbrush of saplings, as the meadow grew over.

Zooks’ memories were real cozy, and Spook couldn’t really stand for that. He was sitting cross-legged on the stone, sort of hunched forward, with a sarcastic smile, and he began to say Zooks was a big baby to be so sentimental. He pointed out how badly the land had been managed: How the hayfield was lost, and how the new sugar maples grew too densely, so that they were killing each other. He pointed out how a lot of the skinny maples had already died, and stood silver and barkless among their brethren. Their Dad would never like to see his land mismanaged like that; the trees should have been thinned; the dead trees were scarring the living ones when they swayed in gales; if the land wasn’t going to be used for hay the land could have grown some good sugarbush; thinned trees would already have grown twice as big. At the very least their Mom should have all the dead, dry maples cleaned out and cut up; they would make good biscuit-wood for kitchen stoves.

Zooks nodded as Spook said all this pragmatic, Yankee stuff, and then just smiled, and said he liked the noise the maples made in the wind, when they grew too crowded, especially during the winter gales, when they all clacked together.

Spook looked really indignant and asked Zooks how he could be so impractical. Didn’t Zooks know it was really bad for trees to knock together like that?

You would have thought Spook was dead serious, the way his eyes widened with outrage and showed their whites, but the way Zooks just smiled lazily back at him let you see that’s just their way of joshing each other. Anyway, it’s just about impossible to get Zooks arguing back. He just agrees with whatever you are saying, and then has his own opinion all the same. I wish I could be so easy-going. It must be something he learned from having three older brothers bossing him about all the time.

Anyway, I used the crowded maples to switch the subject to talking about Lysenko, cos I like showing off stuff I learned studying economics at Dunrobin, and also I think it’s just a story I like telling, cos Lysenko’s so crazy. Not that most people care a hoot about what I’ve learned, but I knew the Lasaumilles would listen, and of course they did.

I talked about how Lysenko would have said the maples would recognize the other maples as brother communists, and Lysenko would have insisted they wouldn’t compete with each other. Both Zooks and Spook smiled, as if they found the idea pretty funny. As I talked Spook took out a little, tin, cough-drop box, opened it, and started to roll a joint. That seemed just like the old days, and I was really happy.

Spook is no GG, but he is really frugal with his pot. He even licks a finger and tests the wind, so not even a flake of green will be blown from the paper. He’s real thrifty, and meticulous, and rolls these joints that aren’t much thicker than a wooden matchstick. (Of course I was in no position to complain, cos I haven’t had anything to share for a while. When I first got back from Scotland it was like no one would leave me alone, but lately there’s been a DD, (Dope Drought,) and I’ve been pretty straight.)

One thing I really like about the Lasaumilles (and also you) is that they don’t let a joint kill the conversation. With some kids as soon as you take the pot out, that’s all they want to talk about: the pot and the buzz. You could be talking about the meaning of life, but pretty soon they’re just going, “Wow, man. I’m wicked high, man.” It bores the crap out of me. I got so fed up with it last summer I took off hitchhiking up to Canada for a while, just looking for someone who could be more interesting than that. But that was only cos the Lasaumille’s were off visiting their Dad. With the Lasaumilles around you won’t miss a beat as the joint passes; you stay on the subject; if you’re talking about Lysenko you’ll keep talking about Lysenko.

Zooks was chuckling in his slow way, saying he liked Lysenko’s idea of plants talking to each other. He decided they probably did, in some way we couldn’t hear, and he wondered how maples decided which ones would die, when they were over-crowded.

Spook scoffed that maples didn’t agree on anything; it was ruthless competition, and survival was decided by which maple grew the highest twigs, and could shove its leaves in front of the others and grab the sun.

Zooks said that was a stupid idea; who ever heard of a ruthless maple? Maples were sweet. Everyone knew they made sugar. Ruthlessness wasn’t in a maple’s nature; they just grew where they got planted by the wind.

Spook said it was the wind that was ruthless then, cos it planted some maples where the roots got lots of compost and water, while others got nothing but stones.

Zook nodded, but then said they each just took what they got, and did what they could with it. When they were done, well, that was that: time to fall and be compost for the kids. Spook said the kids got nothing but shade, it was some neighboring tree muscling in who got most of the compost. Zook just nodded, as if he saw nothing offensive about the deal, but Spook looked a little indignant as he lit the joint.

Just as he lit it I had a sort of sick feeling come over me. It was a sort of anxious feeling down in the pit of my stomach, and it surprised me, cos I was really happy, just sitting there and dangling my legs and watching the ideas come and go. One second the light was shining down, and the next there was a wave of darkness.

It was one of those Stinedu feelings: It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make a lick of sense, it makes you sit up and take notice, sort of the way you get a feeling someone is looking at you, and can’t help but glance over your shoulder, even if you think there is no such thing as mind-reading. So I looked around, and focused in on Spook. As he sucked in the smoke he was living up to his nickname: He looked spooked.

It hit me that Spook hadn’t always looked spooked. In a flash I remembered being really small, when he and Zooks went to the same nursery school as me. I got invited to Zooks’ third birthday party, back when their barn actually had hay in it. His Mom hadn’t gone stir-crazy yet, and was really trying to be a super-Mom, and instead of being down on her sons she had gone to all sorts of trouble to make a really neat party for them. I remember Zooks walking around with an expression of happy disbelief, and that Spook’s face had a relaxed, friendly look, and his eyes were clear and far-seeing. That’s the Spook I like best, the Spook who isn’t spooked.

It was only after his parents broke up that Spook’s face took on the spooked look. I didn’t understand why he looked that way, until my parents did the same thing. Then I understood. In fact my nickname might have been Spook, but Spook got the nickname first.

One of the only good things about moving from my real home to the Fossil’s house was that Spook lived closer by, so I got to know him better, and we could compare notes, and we found out we both were spooked. It’s good when you don’t feel so alone. In fact it got hard to talk about feeling spooked cos we felt less spooked right away, cos we weren’t alone any more.

When we talked about what had spooked us we decided it was mostly cos divorce was so rare back when our folks did it. Before our parents did it divorce was a bad thing that pretty much only happened in Hollywood, so that, when Spook’s Mom was the first Mom in town to do it, everyone pointed at him, as well as her, and folk all whispered and gossiped.

Having people point at you and whisper is a really scary thing to have happen, when you’re just a kid. It makes you feel alone, and you look spooked. I think it happened to Spook around 1960, and I sort of wondered why the heck he started looking that way. Maybe I even pointed at him and whispered, “Why is that kid acting so spooked?” And someone probably whispered back, “Haven’t you heard? His Mom is Divorced!!!!” I didn’t really understand what that meant, but I probably said something like, “Oh how horrible!” I didn‘t have much pity, until it happened to me, around 1964.

At first it was really horrible, having folk point at me and whisper, and I went through a spell where I decided everyone sucked and I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone. But then around 1967 divorce happened to more and more kids, until by 1969 it was sort of like there were more of us than there were of them, so it wasn’t spooky any more. It wasn’t as spooky for us, at least. It might have been spooky, all of a sudden, for the people who used to whisper about us. Not that we pointed at them and whispered back at them in revenge, or anything. But it did seem ironic that Spook and me had to suffer so much for what now was no-big-deal. In fact Spook once scornfully told me he’d heard a kid say to another kid, “Have your parents divorced yet?” like the guy was talking about his family buying a new car. All the humiliation and shame was gone, which didn’t exactly seem fair to Spook and me, after all we’d gone through.

Anyway, I sure was glad to get away from that spooked feeling in 1969, and I figured it was gone for good, but now I was looking at Spook, and it was back. I think that was what made my gut nervous. Why was it back?

I right away had this feeling of pity well up in me, cos I didn’t want Spook to feel spooked. I mean, maybe Spook is always going to be a little spooked, cos he’s Spook, after all, but you don’t want it extreme. A little is good, cos Spook’s always the guy on the lookout, who spots the police car lurking in the bushes off the road spying for speeders. Having Spook be a little paranoid means he’s the guy who keeps you from getting a speeding ticket. But too much is pain, and I never want a friend in pain.

But what the heck can you do? I mean, when you and I invented the word Stinedu we said it stood for, “Shared Thought I Never, Ever Dared Utter.” And, if you don’t dare utter it, how are you supposed to bring it up?

I suppose one of these days I’ll just have the guts to come out and say, “I see darkness pooling all around you, and it makes my heart go out to you, cos I want you in the light.” But for now saying that seems a bit weird and out of place, so I just bite my tongue.

Instead I passed the joint, and sort of tried to steer the conversation. I can’t really say where I am steering it, or why I’m steering the way I steer, except to say it is for the light. It’s like groping in the dark, with the dimmest light coming from somewhere, but you’re not exactly sure what direction the dim light is coming from.

The weird thing is that the sense of darkness grew as we talked, even though our talk was just the sort of talk I like having. Then I heard a muttering in the sky behind us, and looked over my shoulder, and realized a storm was coming up. So it was getting darker because of that, not because of some psychic ability I had. I got a private chuckle about that, but couldn’t shake that other queasiness.

We went from talking about Lysenko, to talking about why some maples live and others die, to Fate, to Karma. That took us from me showing off stuff I learned at Dunrobin, to Spook showing off stuff he learned while trying out that Kundalini Yoga at Audley Bine’s commune.

Of course my ears perked right up, cos I’m interested in that commune.

One thing I learned right off the bat was that Spook has picked up a whole, new slew of jargon. I had to keep asking him what words meant. A lot was Hindu and Buddhist stuff, and the rest was all the shrink-jargon that drives my Dad nuts, (cos Dad says it isn’t science and shouldn’t be called medicine.) It sounded to me like Audley’s commune was a whole slumgullian stew of beliefs, all mixed up together with a dash of hash.

It also didn’t sound to me like Audley’s commune had lifted Spook up into the light, all that much. In fact as he got stoned he used all the jargon to talk himself into a sort of corner, and he got more and more like a guy who can’t move, cos he’s afraid he’ll break something.

It had something to do with some Hindu guru named Jane, which seems a pretty sissy name for a fellow, in my book. This Jane fellow wouldn’t eat meat or even kill plants, and I guess he either fasted or ate fruit, and walked around naked cos he couldn’t use animal skins or the corpses of unwilling plants. That might be OK in India where it’s summer all the time, but it sure wouldn’t work around here. Around here the guru Jane might convert a bunch of hippy-dippy nudists in June, but by October nudism would get old, cos of the first frost, and that Jane fellow’s congregation would dwindle pretty fast. But in India the Jane guy got to be a big guru, with lots of followers, and they even built churches for him the way we build churches for Jesus here, but then he went out of style there, so most of those churches are empty now, but he seemed to have nearly converted one fellow here, and that fellow was Spook.

Spook was looking really closely at a spot of lichen on the granite, and pointed at it, and said, “It is every bit alive as we are. What gives us the right to walk all over it?”

Zooks said, in a squeezed sort of voice cos his lungs were full of smoke, “Maybe lichen likes being walked on.”

Spook said, reaching to take the joint from Zooks, “I’m not talking about the stupid lichen. I’m talking about those tiny mites living in the lichen.”

I wondered what he was talking about, cos I couldn’t see any mites. But Zooks didn’t even bother looking, and just drawled, “How do you know lichen is stupid? Are you bigoted against life that lacks brains?”

Spook couldn’t answer, cos he was inhaling, but his eyes bugged out and he shook his head vehemently at Zooks, and he held up the index finger of one hand, as he passed the joint to me with the other.

I could tell the pot was powerful, because my lips always get numb before my brain does, and my lips were already feeling numb as I took my second hit.

Spook spoke a rush of words, with the smoke spilling around his lips and his voice a strange gargling, cos he was speaking through so much smoke. Behind him there was distant thunder, high up in the sky and not thudding, but also making an odd gargling sound. Spook said, “Don’t be such a big baby! I already told you I’m not talking about the lichen. An elephant could step on lichen, and it probably would survive, unless it was a whole herd of elephants making a path. I’m talking about those mites. They are so small you can’t even pick one up. No matter how hard you try to be gentle, you smush them.”

“Then don‘t pick them up,” said Zooks, with a slow smile, reaching out to take the joint from me. He had to be careful cos it was already getting short, and also cos I wasn‘t paying proper attention, cos my nose was practically pressing on the lichen, as I went cross-eyed trying to see what the heck Spook was talking about.

“I haven’t tried to pick one up in years,” said Spook a little self-righteously. “I was just a kid when I learned how fragile they are.”

“Wow,” I said, even though I hate people who say nothing but “Wow” when they get high. I said “Wow” cos I had suddenly seen the mites, cos the lichen, which I usually think of as being flat, suddenly became 3D and seemed like the top of a forest. Down between the taller boughs were tiny red dots, wandering on the lichen forest-floor. I haven’t a clue if they had eight legs or six legs or legs at all, cos the legs were too small to see. The only reason I could see the mites at all was because they clashed so crimson, against the lichen, which was vividly silver and pistachio green. I sat up and waited for my eyes to come back into focus, and then asked Spook, “How the heck did you ever notice those critters?”

Zooks said, “Oh, he’s always looking for small things to be a big, bleeding-heart baby about.”

Spook protested, “Well, they have every much a right to live as we do, don’t they?”

Zooks nodded, thoughtful and serious, before adding, “And they have the same right we have, to watch out for stomping elephants.”

Spooks shook his head. “They don’t have the time to get away. We just come along and crush them.”

Zooks sighed. Then he said, “It’s not like I get up in the morning and say to myself, ‘I think I’ll go out and murder some innocent mites.’”

Spook looked depressed, and despaired, “We do it all the same. Wherever we walk, we wreck things, destroy things, crush life.”

“So do elephants,” said Zook softly. “Should we put elephants on trial for stepping on ants?”

“We’re suppose to be smarter than elephants,” countered Spook.

Zooks couldn’t think of a reply, and when he simply nodded, with a noncommittal face, Spook smiled, as if he had scored a point.

I didn’t much like feeling guilty for walking, but couldn’t see how to steer the conversation towards any sort of light. Instead of high my brain felt numb and stupid, and I wished to God I could think of some way to change the subject. Then there was a flash of lightning, and an idea popped into my head. I said, “I know an elephant who is wicked careful.” Both Spook and Zooks looked at me curiously, so after a pause I said, “Horton.”

A big smile spread across Zooks’ face, as Spook said, “Who?”

“Horton. You know: That elephant that hatches eggs and hears a Who, in the Dr. Seuss stories. An elephant’s got to be pretty darn careful to sit on an egg, without breaking it, but Horton could manage it.” Spook was looking at me with a disapproving look, as if he thought I was poking fun at him, so I stayed serious. “It makes me wonder about Dr. Seuss. Do you suppose he is a follower of Guru Jane?”

It must have been the way I said it, cos a smile started twitching at the corners of Spook’s mouth, and abruptly he cracked up laughing. He laughed and laughed, and then said, “Dr. Seuss is a Jainist. What a hoot!” And laughed some more.

I pretended to be hurt, and turned to Zooks and pouted, “Is he laughing at me?”

Zooks said, “Oh, he’s just a big elephant, trampling your tender heart.”

We were just joking, but for some reason that spooked Spook. His laughter cut short, and he stiffened up and sat up erect, and said, “I’m serious about this stuff.” His face got softer, and he confessed, “I’m a vegetarian.”

I said, “So was Horton.”

For a second Spook stayed serious, but then his lips started twitching and he cracked up again. He could barely take the roach from Zooks, but somehow he managed to take it and affix it to a roach clip he took from his little box. That kept him busy, and gave me some time to talk.

I turned to Zooks and laughed that when I was at Dunrobin I had argued that Horton was as important as Hamlet, cos Dr. Seuss is America’s greatest poet just like Shakespeare is England‘s. I was just steering the conversation away from Spook going on about not being able to walk without killing something, but Zooks looked up with his eyes soft and dilated, wearing a real friendly smile, and maybe he did some steering of his own.

Zooks lay with his head propped up by an elbow. He didn’t cup his chin in his left hand, like most people would do, but instead split his index and middle fingers and held his left ear sort of like you’d hold a cigarette. That tilted his face, and made him look even more relaxed and comfortable than usual. Meanwhile he was using his free right hand to do a sort of doodling with bits of sticks, in a vibe-place indentation in the top of our vibe-place outcropping.

I’m not sure what makes those dents in the first place, probably glaciers or some such thing, but Yankee lore says the Indians used them. Whenever there was a dent in the stone by an Indian trail, they’d use it while on a journey, cos they didn’t grind corn until it was time to cook it. If you search about a bit you sometimes can even find the round stone they used as a mortar. The dent was the pestle. When they were done grinding they’d leave the round stone behind for the next Indian who used the trail. Over the years the dent got worn deeper and deeper.

Spook and Zooks’ Dad had told them this lore, before he got booted off his land, and he also said an Indian trail used to go along the route of the horse trail that ran under the outcropping, ‘cos that land happened to be the high ground that divided the Concord River from the Charles River. Indian trails stuck to the high ground.

Of course, back during my Senior Summer, the rest of us were wicked excited to hear Spook and Zooks tell us this story, about our campsite, and when we found a round stone down in a crack in the outcropping beside the dent, we figured it just had to be an Indian corn-grinding mortar. It made us feel like we might be camping right where the Indians did. Of course, it’s been something like three hundred years since any Indians took that trail, so frost has chipped away at the dent’s smoothness, and the dent is filled with dirt, but it still seems like a special place.

As Zooks talked and listened he reached his long arms down into cracks in the outcropping, and brought up twigs that had fallen in, and broke the twigs into short sections, and played with them, like a doodler plays with a pen on paper when he probably should be taking notes.

At first Zooks only formed boxes and rectangles, but then moved on to making twigs be star shapes, and then built a little teepee of sticks that stood up from the dirt in the dent. Before you knew it he had a little stockade built around the teepee, and log cabins, and further stockades like a maze, and even a lean-two with a funny turret like a steeple. As he talked Zook got this whole little twig-town developing, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he could possibly be listening to me, but he did it all in such a casual way, and kept asking me such sharp questions, that I knew he was listening.

Anyway, I think I was aiming to steer the subject around to what a softy that Horton the Elephant was, always feeling he had to take care of eggs and small Who-planets that it wasn’t really his business to take care of. Then I was going to say making kids read about Horton was a kind of brainwashing that Weston Moms laid on us. They wanted us to take care of all this business it wasn’t really our business to take care of, even as they didn’t take care of our Dads and instead booted Dads out of their homes and out on their ears: Typical Weston-Mom hypocrisy.

Instead Zooks steered me. He got real interested in Dunrobin, and how the heck I got into a situation where I wound up arguing that Dr. Seuss was America’s greatest poet. And I can’t say that I minded. It seemed like the first time since I got back from Scotland that anyone bothered ask me what I’d been through. In fact how I’ve been treated here reminds me of how soldiers like Wilfred Owens got treated, when they came back on leave from the trenches during World War One. They wanted to talk about what they‘d been through, but people assumed they didn’t, and also people just didn’t want to hear about gory trenches.

Of course, you were in the Goat’s class with me, so you saw all my arguing first hand, but it was fun to tell someone else about it, and about the changes I went through.

I told them that when I first got to Dunrobin I just figured the establishment sucked, cos the establishment in Weston is such a bunch of hypocrites. So when the Goat said Shakespeare was good, I just figured that was the establishment talking, and therefore Shakespeare must have been a fuddy-duddy, brown-nose, suck-up square, kissing up to royalty and writing whatever they wanted to hear. And that’s what I argued, in my essays. But the Goat insisted I give examples, in my essays. So I looked for examples, and that forced me to dig deeper, and all of a sudden I got blown away. It was like a brick hit me between the eyes, cos I suddenly saw Shakespeare is a really trippy fellow, really high.

I really needed that, cos I was withdrawing from so many drugs and from cigarettes and was all shaky, and cos withdrawal is so opposite from being high. Poetry got to be like mescaline, without the cost or the paranoia about getting arrested, and so I dove head first into Shakespeare, and also Milton, Chaucer, Keats, Shelly, and all those heaps and heaps of other writers the Goat crammed down our throats. Of course, I wasn’t going to admit to the Goat he was right about anything, and kept right on pointing out Shakespeare never got his head chopped off by insulting the Queen, and I said that showed Shakespeare was a brown-nose, and hadn’t the guts to fight royalty like an American would.

That was when I was sorry I argued so much, cos when I said America was so cool the Goat made me study all these American writers, and asked me to show how they were better than Shakespeare. I didn’t want to do that, partly cos I was too overworked to begin with, and also cos the American writers didn’t get me high. To be honest, compared to the English ones, most of them suck. They are rustic. It’s like comparing Grandma Moses to Rembrandt. I like some of the guys, like Mark Twain, but they write like reporters. There’s no poetry, and I was always gasping for poetry at Dunrobin the same way I was always gasping for a cigarette or a joint or a tab of speed.

So I had to get myself out of that corner, and the way I did it was to quote Dr. Seuss. It was a shortcut, cos I didn’t have to do any reading, cos I’d read the books to my little brother and sister so many times I had them all memorized, and the Goat had never read any Dr. Seuss, and so there was no way for him to check up on my bullshit. I went on and on about how millions of American children had their brains washed by Dr. Seuss the same way English kids have their brains washed by Shakespeare, and how that makes Dr. Seuss America’s greatest poet.

Zooks was laughing as I told this story, but Spook looked really critical as he handed me the roach clip. He got all serious on me, and, in that through-smoke-voice of his, he asked me if I really believed my own bullshit.

I sucked at the roach, and realized I was feeling pretty stoned and in no mood to get all serious, but I tried to think as I handed the clip on to Zooks. It had gone out, and was pretty small, but he lit it with his lighter and took a small hit before handing it back to Spook. It had already gone out a second time, and Spook carefully put the fragment of roach into his little box. That kid throws nothing away.

I exhaled, and noticed how dark it had gotten. The thunder was still muttering far away, and was no closer and even seemed to be happening less, but the growing gloom made me feel I was up against darkness, and sometimes that gets me boxed into a sort of fighting mood, where I want to hurl around light and drive the dark to the shadows. So I said it wasn’t bullshit, for me to say that Dr. Seuss was a great poet.

Then it was just like the old days, as Spook and I did this thing we call “eyebrow fencing,” where we don’t say anything and just move our eyebrows a lot. I bunch mine up like I’m all pugnacious, and am saying, “Do you want to start a fight about it? Got a problem?” Meanwhile Spook’s eyebrows moon up all disarming, as if he is saying, “Do continue. You were saying?” The loser is the guy who speaks first, cos whoever speaks is at a sort of disadvantage, so neither of us speak, and instead stare each other down. It’s a joke we have, that nobody but us gets.

Zooks has seen it plenty, but can’t stand it. So he told us to stop acting like babies, and then asked me if I was serious about Dr. Seuss.

I said I was, cos I defined poetry differently than most. I said I’d been looking through magazines, to see what sort of poetry was fashionable in America, so I’d know which of my lyrics might sell, and all that I could see was that all the poetry in magazines was morose garbage. The poetry in magazines was all trying to out-Ginsburg Ginsburg, and was like a newspaper reporter reporting their own depravity. The more depraved it got, the more original it was suppose to be. It was all scab-picking, all the-sucking-of-chapped-and-split-lips, and about the sting and taste of your own lip’s blood, as if that was suffering and proved reporters were poets. It had zero to do with real poetry, which is about the light, and about truth and beauty and joy and love. I said that Dr. Seuss at least got the joy part right. Maybe his stuff’s a cartoon, but a cartoon makes you laugh at least.

Spook butted in, saying he didn’t see what was so hot about English poetry. He said that the only Shakespeare he’d been able to force himself to read was MacBeth, and he thought that was a pretty gross and gruesome play, and as black as night. What did that have to do with joy?

I said it still showed the light, cos the bad guys in Shakespeare make a bad choice that takes them away from the light, and you see how horrible being away from the light is. What’s more, the bad guys see it too, and moan and groan poetry about the midnights they’ve gotten themselves into. Even as things get darker and darker, the subject is the still the light. That’s what is so tragic about the tragedy: Macbeth was after joy, cos he thought power would bring joy, but when he murdered Duncan for power he found out there was no joy. Then he was stuck with the consequences of his foul deed, and the play is about his suffering as he found out there was no joy in power. However joy remains the subject.

You know how I can talk this way. The Goat gagged us with so much Shakespeare it oozes out our pores. But Spook looked sort of taken aback to hear me speak like I was some sort of expert. (Spook is way ahead, for an American kid, in that he actually read some Shakespeare. I sure didn’t get taught any, in the Fussybus’s English classes, and most kids only know about Romeo and Juliet cos they saw that American movie that came out in ‘69.)

I liked it that Spook looked taken aback. It was almost like respect. I decided I was on a roll, and went with the flow, talking about how Love is the answer, and poetry should trace a light that already exists, and how no poet makes a sunrise; they just remember every sunrise that has ever existed since the dawn of time. Then Zooks brought me back to earth by asking me if I liked any American poets besides Dr Seuss.

That brought me up short, cos the poetry I like most is all in the lyrics of music, and it’s hard to tell if the lyrics would be any good without the music playing. So I puzzled a bit, and then asked Zooks if he meant poetry outside of the lyrics of music. Zooks said he meant outside of music, and that let me off the hook, not only cos I can’t tell if lyrics would touch me so much without music playing, but also cos Spook has a gigantic collection of record albums, and he’d have a huge advantage over me if the talk went that way.

I said I liked Robert Frost best, cos he was just a guy dealing with the same harsh, Yankee landscape we had to deal with, but he saw poetry in it. What’s more, he actually made poetry out of a pretty grim and dark part of the world. It was a triumph of light, and that was what I liked seeing: Light triumphing. I went on to say that was what we should make our business be: Making light triumph in a dark part of the world.

I was on a roll, and also stoned out of my gourd, but Spook and Zooks like me that way. They were both smiling at me, and I can’t tell you how encouraging that is. Lots of times people make me feel like I’m some sort of crackpot Christian preacher, when I talk of the light, or, even worse, like I’m a deranged Adolph Hitler. I’m just trying to say what is good and beautiful and true, but I feel like Winston Churchill must have felt, when everyone called him a warmonger for saying England ought to make ready to defend itself against Hitler. The difference is, I’m no Winston Churchill, and when everyone tells me to shut up, I do shut up. Churchhill kept right on talking, but I need encouragement, and that was what I was getting from Zooks and Spook’s smiles.

Of course, I right away had to head towards Stinedu territory. It’s like there are these things you need to talk about that are taboo to talk about, and when you open your mouth you put your foot in it. I was so stoned that I did it twice in the same sentence, and both Zooks’s and Spook’s smiles vanished. It seemed to be getting really dark, just then.

Hell if I can remember the sentence, but I offended Zooks by saying that if his Mom could steal this land from his Dad, there must be a way for us to steal it back from her. In the same sentence I managed to offend Spook by bringing up Audley Bine.

I dimly recall the sentence was suppose to be a joke, and joyful. I was just remembering Audley Bine going all gushy and saying my “Wind’s Song” poem about the Party Woods was better than Robert Frost, and suggesting maybe he was right, and maybe my lyrics might make good money, and that maybe we could buy the land back from their Mom and have a commune better than Audley’s, but, how ever the words came out, they were very wrong. Winston Churchhill must’ve been rolling in his grave.

They both looked disappointed in me, and a very bright flash of lightning broke the silence, and a loud thud of thunder thumped about seven seconds away.

Zooks did the polite thing to do, when a stoned friend has stepped over the line and dared utter a Stinedu. He talked about the weather. He said maybe we should go back and make sure we had shut the hood of Spook’s Rambler, before it started pouring, cos he couldn‘t remember if we‘d closed it or not.

I told him to quit being such a big baby. It was obvious the storm was fizzling out. Maybe some storms re-strengthen after falling from the Worchester Hills, when they rise again at the Weston hills, but the humidity was still too dry for that, and the sun had sunk too low for that, and this storm had blown its wad. The thunder was getting less and less frequent, and it was all the cloud-to-cloud stuff that makes soft thunder. That one loud bolt was just a last gasp. We might not even get any rain.

As if to make a liar out of me, a few fat raindrops patted down, but then, as if to redeem me, the pattering stopped. However I got a different cloudburst from Spook, who let me have it with both barrels for being ignorant about what stinking Hitler Audley Bine had been, running his commune.

I’ve wanted to hear about that commune, so I probably should have shut up and nodded a lot, but what Spook’s described was nothing, compared to Dunrobin. The Goat was fifty times more like Hitler than Audley Bine, and the Goat was pretty permissive, by Dunrobin standards. So I said so, and said Audley Bine didn’t sound like a Hitler to me. I said he sounded like a big, fat sissy, or even like a Weston Mom.

That made Spook laugh, but then he came right back at me. He said Dunrobin sounded like a boot camp, and that when he joined the commune he wasn’t enlisting in any stupid army. He said if you join the army you’re asking for it, but they actually pay you for it. Also you are so busy drilling there’s no time to cook or do your own laundry. Someone else does it for you. At Audley’s commune he had to pay rent and cook and do laundry and still do his homework and go to school and work a job.

I said I could see his point. Maybe Dunrobin was like the army, and I got the hell beat out of me compared to anything Spook could even imagine, but I got fed and got my laundry done. Maybe I wasn’t getting paid, but I wasn’t paying for it, either. The Fossil was forking out the tuition. In Spook’s case he was working his butt off and paying, only to get subjected to Audley’s crap. I said I could see the difference.

Spook nodded, pouting in a sort of regal way, until I sort of timidly ventured that a lot of what he described still didn’t sound like Hitler to me. Weren’t Audley’s commands more like helpful suggestions?

Spook vehemently shook his head. He said Audley pretended to be all friendly and understanding, but fucked with your head.

Zooks scorned that Audley wanted to be a guru, with a bunch of obedient disciples, and was trying to form a cult.

Spook said Audley didn’t want to be a guru; he wanted to be a queen. He didn’t like it when girls came over, and he had made Motey wicked uncomfortable.

I said that sounded like Dunrobin. They didn’t want us to have anything to do with girls. Then I laughed and said the army wasn’t big on having girls in the barracks, either.

Spook said the whole reason he’d left home was cos his Mom made such a big stink about him snuggling with Motey out in the barn. She didn’t just embarrass the crap out of him; she also just plain made him mad. A Mom isn’t suppose to be dating, and a son is suppose to be dating, but she had it all backwards, she with her five purses. Spook just couldn’t stand it, and went to get a place where he could snuggle with Motey, but then Audley stuck his big nose in.

The weird thing is that, even as Spook blasted Audley, he used all the words Audley had taught him. For example, rather than saying “The start of it was,” he said, “The psychodrama prime of it was.”

Anyway, Audley made Motey really uncomfortable right off the bat. She’s wicked talkative, (“Motey” is short for “Motor Mouth,”) and Audley would nod and smile as she talked. You wouldn’t think that would make a girl uncomfortable, but Spook said it’s the way Audley does it that makes girls uncomfortable; it’s like he’s a shrink and is figuring them out, looking down a snobby nose. The smiling and nodding is just a front, as he pencils down notes.

What happened next was that, as soon as Motey was uncomfortable, Audley said the discomfort was an “issue.” He said they needed to talk about it, but Motey pretty much told him to go get stuffed. She didn’t want any damn psychoanalysis. Then, after Motey had gone home, Audley would tell Spook she had problems, and was displaying “resistance,” and maybe Spook should face the fact she was immature.

Spook got stuck in a triangle, sort of like the one I’m always in with Durf and Eve, where he was getting pulled in two directions at once. It wasn’t really fair, cos Spook was working so hard to make a place for Motey, but in the end she said she didn’t want to come to the commune any more, and Audley said he didn’t really like her coming. Pretty soon after that Spook and Motey broke up, and not long after that the commune broke up as well, and Spook went home. He didn’t exactly go back to his Mom with his tail between his legs, but he wasn’t very proud about anything, either. The look on his face was pretty bitter as he described things falling apart.

I said it sounded pretty sad, and that I’d always really liked Spook and Motey, as a couple. When I was clutching at straws, trying to keep from going nuts at Dunrobin, I’d imagine a perfect commune, and in the perfect commune I always imagined Spook and Motey were together, like they were last summer. I innocently wondered if there was any way they could patch things up, and got a look from Spook that shut me right up.

The look was really baleful, and he shot it right when a long flicker of lightning went cloud-to-cloud way up high, so his face was lit with grim shadows. Then everything seemed plunged into purple. The lightning was so high up it was around fifteen seconds before I heard the far up thunder, which was sort of soft and hushed, but during those fifteen seconds my stomach felt really bad, cos Spook had looked really mad at me.

Spook sighed and said I didn’t understand what a total drag a commune could be. It starts out really fun, cos you have a place where everyone can hang out, and everyone is your friend. But then it turns out they all just want a warm place where they can get away from their parents, and all are a bunch of lazy moochers, and no one lifts a finger to help.

I wondered if we could avoid all that at our new commune, but having me say that must have somehow rubbed Spook the wrong way, cos all of a sudden he brought up one time a guy named Neil brought Eve to Audley’s commune.

Eve and I have been going steady for a long time, but there were two times we broke up for a while. One time was when her Mom and Dad wouldn‘t let her go out into the Party Woods with me, and I got fed up with her never being allowed to do anything. I hung out in the woods with teeny-boppers who either had parents who didn’t care, or had parents who weren’t watchful and let them sneak, but they didn’t seem as deep as Eve, so I went back to her and we made up. The second time was when I went to Dunrobin, and we agreed a year was a long time to never have any fun, so we said we‘d be honest with each other if we decided to go out with someone. Of course, there was no way for me to go out with anyone at Dunrobin, cos they don‘t let you out. I missed Eve tons and mailed her tons of letters and she never wrote back. Then I got a letter, just before the postal strike, where she was honest and said she‘d gone out with Neil.

Then I got to see how she felt, when she was stuck at home as I romped about the Party Woods with lots of teeny-bopper girls around me. Now I was the guy stuck at home, in a way. It felt really horrible and I went sort of crazy. That was when Bear and Rat showed me how to twist the Dunrobin rules, and sneak down to Golspie, and I made a fool of myself with Ginger, but in the end it taught me a lesson. Then, in the spring, after that never-ending postal strike was finally over, I got a sweet card from Eve, and I saw she wasn’t going out with Neil any more and that she remembered me fondly, and suddenly I was walking on air.

So it wasn’t like Spook surprised me, by talking about Eve going out with Neil. But even after all this time, hearing about Eve visiting Audley Bine’s with Neil awoke a jealousy in me. It seemed odd, cos I hadn’t been feeling jealous, yet it seemed to stab my gut and get worse, the more Spook spoke, and suddenly I looked at him, and the way he looked in the dim light really gave me the creeps, cos I saw Spook was doing it on purpose.

It’s hard to describe how creepy it was. It was like a shadow in him was stirring up a shadow in me, and feeding on it with relish. Spook liked seeing me brought low. And suddenly I was glad I got all that Shakespeare crammed down my throat, cos Spook reminded me of Iago, stirring up the jealousy in Othello.

I never could figure Iago out. Why would hurting a friend make anyone happy? So I just looked at Spook, wondering why the heck he was doing what he was doing, and suddenly his face completely changed. It went from snickering and gloating about getting me all jealous, to a sort of terror, for he could see I saw right through him. It was like he thought I’d walk over and belt him.

Instead I felt really sad. I looked up at the purple sky, and just wished the light would come down. Off through the woods I could hear a sighing like wind, but steadier, and realized rain was falling far away. I sighed too, and turned to Spook and shook my head. Then I confessed hearing about Eve with Neil still got me jealous as hell, even though she’d told me it was just a fling and nothing happened and she liked me more. The jealousy was dumb. I should get over it, but it kept happening.

I’m not sure why that was the right thing to say, but it sure as hell was. Zooks got all jovial, telling me nice stuff, like how he could see Eve thought Neil was a jerk even when she went out with him, but I was looking at Spook, and it was like his fear had popped like a bubble. He was looking to the west, and his face lit up, elated.

Actually the west really was brightening, as the sinking sun started to peek under the lid of the storm. It was still very purple to the east, and the rain came sighing up and leaves began to twitch and jerk as the drops fell, but the sun swiftly burst out bright on the western horizon, and its light came flooding towards us under the clouds, touching the treetops, until the lit leaves were like green gold against the purple east, and between those bright leaves Spook suddenly spotted pieces of a brilliant rainbow. He simply exclaimed, “Rainbow!” Then he looked at Zooks with his eyebrows arching, and Zooks said, “East Outlook?” And then those two just took off.

Man O Man can those guys ever run, especially when it is through woods like a steeplechase, leaping over logs and hopping across boulders. I tried to keep up but faded behind, laughing, cos it felt so good to just be running and quit all the crap about thinking about red mites on green lichen, and the morality of stepping on them. It felt like chains fell off and we were free. Suddenly we were just kids again, running at top speed through rain to a rainbow.

They were already lounging when I got there. The sun was so low it made the rainbow really high, and we just praised it and enthused about all sorts of hopeful stuff. Even though the rain stopped you could still see it falling silver against the purple to the east, and the rainbow just got brighter. It’s hard to be down with a rainbow looking back at you, and I talked again about buying the Party Woods and starting a commune that actually worked, and this time I felt really good about it.

Then the rainbow faded as the sun set, and we headed back. It was still beautiful, with the western twilight putting rouge on the face of the purple east, and the woods still dripping the remembered rain and making a music with the birds, but as it grew darker it was like I could see the shadow coming back to Spook.

*******

LOCAL VIEW –Peas and Patriots–

(photo credit: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/fp.php?pid=6688362#b )

Yesterday, with the help of my eldest daughter, we got 75 feet of edible podded peas planted. (I don’t bother with the ordinary peas any more; too long a run for too short a slide.) With God’s grace we should be getting crunchy pea pods to munch around June 15. They are incredibly popular with the kids at the Childcare, often to the amazement of parents who can’t get the same children to eat vegetables at home.

Actually it is a double row, (and therefore 150 feet,) with the two rows around a foot apart and a four-foot-high fence running between them, for them to climb on. Last year they grew two feet above the top of the fence, and formed a pretty hedge with snowy white blooms, and then began producing more pea pods than we knew what to do with. I became a pea pod philanthropist, and resorted to freezing them in a way I read about on the web where you don’t bother with blanching, (not bad, but the texture was a bit fuzzy when they were thawed and boiled up in February,) and still I had too many. It turns out that picking them just stimulates them to make more. So finally I just set the kids loose to graze on them, despite the fact they tended to rip up some plants by the roots, when picking pods.

There was something about grazing that made munching vegetables much more attractive to even the most fussy child. Some, who absolutely insisted they hated all peas, would start out merely hanging out with the others, and then I’d see them sneak a nibble, when they thought I wasn’t looking. I tried not to rub it in when they joined in with the others, and grazed and munched their way down the row. Others were not officially grazing. They were officially “helping me pick”, but more went into their stomachs than the baskets they carried.

You’d think they’d get sick of eating the same thing. (Actually, come to think of it, one little girl did get sick one afternoon, but it partly was due to failing to chew, and she went right back to munching a couple of days later.) There may have been a few days when interest slacked off, and they were more involved with building forts in the woods, but right to the end of the season, when the heat of July makes the lush plants wither and dry, the children would bring up “pea-picking” as a thing they desired to do.

Not that it will happen again. If children have taught me anything, it is that what works one year may not work the next. However I figured it was worth a try. So, today, my muscles all ache in the way they do, when you put in a garden. When I was younger I would tell myself the ache meant I was getting stronger, and meant I would look more attractive to women at the beach. At age 62 I tell myself it is likely either killing me, or keeping me alive. In any case it is an old, familiar ache that walks hand in hand with Spring.

Less familiar is a sort of post-taxes ache in my brain. I find myself trying to keep books concerning the profit and loss of my pea patch,  and imagine facing a highly suspicious government auditor, who assumes any private business is selfish and greedy, and that only the government has the best interests of children in mind. (The funny thing is that government officials make more, and spend more on themselves, as I make less, and spend more on children.)

I think an ache in your brain is far worse than any ache in the body. It is easier, for me at least, to tune out physical pain. The government is involved in a sort of psychological torture, and it is harder to tune out mental pain, for the tuner itself is involved.

In any case, I find myself muttering to myself, involved in needless justifications of being the being I am, and doing the doings I do. I mean, why should the government care a hoot about a pea patch on a remote farm? Haven’t people got better ways to spend their time than to make me nervous, when I write down “pea patch” as a business expense?

I actually feel the pea patch was a profit, over all, last year, but my measure-of-profit is beyond the ken of needle-nosed bureaucrats who measure with money. When my books show that I spent $5.00 on seed, and didn’t sell any produce, they wonder what happened to the peas I planted. Lord knows what disaster could befall me if they found out I ate some myself. I’d wind up like Al Capone, who could not be arrested for what he did, so they had to get him for “tax evasion”. But what is my crime?

That is the psychological torture, and the cruel and unusual punishment, our government is guilty of. It makes people feel guilty for breathing and being alive.

Or that is what I was muttering to myself today, as I walked about achy. There is so much the government inflicts upon its people that is needless. For example, why shouldn’t I simply pay my employees with cash? Why does my government make me responsible for collecting nine of its ridiculous taxes, and doing all the paperwork? I simply don’t have time for such nonsense, and actually pay a firm called “Paychex” to do all that paperwork for me. It costs me $70.00/week, week after week, and after a year that adds up to $3650.00/year I have to pay, when I could just as well be handing my employees cash, and paying nothing.

The government makes you pay in other ways as well. It adds up, and it isn’t merely taxes. It is tantamount to a sort of endless haranguing that makes a nagging wife seem gentle. It is a psychological torture that either so weakens people that the government sees its people collapse, and has killed the goose that laid the golden egg, or else its people rise up and revolt, being driven mad by the government’s psychological torture, and its people are driven to bizarre behavior, such as dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into a harbor.

Here in New England we celebrate our forefathers going nuts, and throwing perfectly good tea into a harbor, and forcing the authorities to respond, with a holiday we call “Patriot’s Day”. We also have a saying, “Plant your peas by Patriot’s Day”.

Well, I have planted my peas. I also enacted a minor rebellion by burning more weeds in my garden without obtaining the proper burn permit.

There was no wind, and you can only burn weeds when it is dry, but if I had tried to get a burn permit yesterday I know darn well I would have been told I had to wait until it was raining, in which case you cannot burn weeds. The government is idiotic. Farmers have burned weeds in gardens ever since the land was first gardened by Indians, (and likely the woods were burned before that, by the pre-agricultural Indians, to keep the glades open and clear for deer), so I just did what needed to be done without a permit.

The fact of the matter is that the government has created so many laws that the average American commits between two and five felonies each day. (Not misdemeanors; felonies.)The laws are seven stacks of paper, each seven feet tall. No normal person has read them all,  and many laws contradict, (so you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t), and they have reached a sort of tipping point where the Law, which is something we should honor and respect, resembles the raving brays of a jackass.

In the face of the government’s psychological torture, it seems civil disobedience is only natural, however I loathe the violent kind. Blowing up spectators during the Boston Marathon is not my idea of a proper celebration of Patriot’s Day. Rather I prefer the peaceful disobedience of Henry Thoreau, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi. Therefore I burn weeds and plant peas, and have business expenses that put love ahead of profit.

A bit of rain came through this morning and dampened the dust, but by afternoon the sun was back out and the dryness was returning. The radar shows a front passing through, but the government could not bother to put a front on the maps.

 

O-BUOY CAMERAS 9 AND 10 SURVIVE WINTER

Here is a picture of Obuoy 9 last August 2, with a narrow lead widening behind it and melt-water pools forming. That lead soon snapped shut, but the far side of the lead did shift back and forth through the rest of the summer. The melt wasn’t impressive, and snows hid all signs of it by September.

Here is the current view (April 17) from the same camera.

The milder air over the Pole hasn’t made it to the area north of the Canadian Archipelago where Obuoy 9 drifts. The temperature is at -19° (-2° Fahrenheit) and the winds are whistling by at around 25 mph. It looks like the lead of last summer has sealed up and become dormant, but the pressure ridge behind it may have done some grinding during the darkest days. Of greater concern is the small pressure ridge in the foreground, which wasn’t there last autumn. If it becomes active it may tip over our camera.

The best way to experience the journey’s of these cameras is by watching a movie made up of all the pictures.

Obuoy 10 is located further west, in the Beaufort  Sea north of Alaska. It was of interest last summer as a melt-water pool formed in the foreground, and then repetitively drained, refilled, froze over, was drifted over by blowing snow, and refilled again with rain.  All in all the summer was colder than I’ve usually seen, with more snow and refreezing. Here is a picture of the situation on July 15 after a rain, when things were more ordinary and slushy.

There was another slushy period around August 25, but early in September snow covered the scene, and by the time the winter darkness fell most of the yellow on the buoy was hidden by deepening snow. Now, in the dawning light of spring, we can see most of the black is covered as well, though snow actually isn’t as deep as it was last year.

Currently winds are at 13 mph and the temperature is -17° (+1.4 Fahrenheit).

The Army buoy 2013F is “co-located” with this buoy, and shows that the snow is less than last year, but the ice is thicker, at roughly 6 feet thick.

Most of the melting of sea-ice comes from below, and even when the refreeze has started on the upper surface I’ve seen ice break up due to melting from underneath. Watching this buoy this summer may tell us a lot about how much slightly milder water is surging north through Bering Strait due to the current “warm spike” of the PDO.

We also have two new Obuoys north of Alaska to watch. Obuoy 11 is to the east of Obuoy 10, and, with winds at 11 mph and temperatures of -15° g,  sends us this view:

Further to the west and south, down closer to Bering Strait (and therefore more likely to see the ice break up) is new Obuoy 12, which unfortunately has its lens covered with snow at the moment. It is missing a stark scene with temperatures down to -25° (-13° Fahrenheit) and winds nearly calm.

The Obuoys are showing how cold it is on the North American side of the Arctic Ocean, even as a storm sweeps milder air up over the Pole. A tongue of that mildness is actually reaching around and south between Obuoy 9 and Obuoy 10, which is shown by this polar temperature map produced by Dr. Ryan Maue from GFS data over at the Weatherbell site.

One film worth watching is the adventures of Camera 7, which unfortunately didn’t survive the winter of 2013-2014. The film includes a glimpse of polar bear fur (don’t blink) and the camera very slowly tilting over until it is looking off the the edge of ice into water, and then the camera falls in, bobs about the open sea for a while, before it is engulfed by the refreeze. It is a great way to get your mind around the process of thawing and refreezing that occurs every year. Here it is: http://obuoy.datatransport.org/monitor#buoy7/movie

I am thinking I might start a “Polar Camera Post” during the summer, including the pictures from these Obuoy cameras with the pictures from the North Pole Camera. If I do so I am going to try very hard to avoid all discussion about the so-called “Death Spiral,” as I feel that idea has been thoroughly debunked, and to go over the same arguments seems an exercise in futility.  The real and undeniable beauty of these pictures and the natural processes they reveal gets lost, if you indulge in the itching of politics. Therefore, if I get that itch, I’ll succumb to the exercize in futility in a separate post.

NORTH POLE CAMERA UP AND RUNNING

DANGER  Looking at these pictures can be addictive. Furthermore, they can lead to arguments about sea-ice with fanatics, and even (gasp) holding the politically incorrect view that there is no “Death Spiral” and the North Pole isn’t going to become ice-free.

On the other hand, looking at these pictures is soothing on hot summer days, a good way to forget pressing issues and to zone out, and can introduce you to interesting people.

The above view is from camera 1, and is a wide angle lens. I’m not sure what the deal is with camera 2 this year, as it seems to have a narrower view.

The link to these pictures is  http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/index.html .

Currently the camera is at 89.651°N,  38.819°W and is drifting northwest, which is a little unusual, as the camera tends to head south towards Fram Strait. Usually they continue to send pictures into September, but last summer one was knocked over (perhaps by a bear) in late June, and the second was too close to a pressure ridge, which buried it in rubble later in July.

The camera is undergoing a “heat wave”, as a southerly wind has raised temperatures from -15.5°C on at 1730z on April 14 to -2.7°C at 1800z on April 16. (4.1° to 27.1° Fahrenheit)  Winds are quite strong, at a steady 22 mph (gusts aren’t reported.)

The cameras are deployed from the Barnea Camp. With these winds, it must be rough on the tourists at that camp. (See my post at:  https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/jets-landing-gear-fails-at-pole/  )

The cameras take a group of three to six pictures, four times a day. One trick I have learned is to open the pictures to a new tab, and then click back and forth between the pictures. This makes slight shifts in the ice, which otherwise would be difficult to notice, jump out at you, but you need to be careful not to be tricked by the shifting shadows. (One thing to keep an eye out for is polar bear tracks. Keep your fingers crossed no bear gets interested in the camera, because those bums have no respect for all the hard work and tax-dollars involved.)

Usually nothing much happens for the first month or so, as things are basically frozen solid, and temperatures seldom get above freezing until June. Once temperatures get above freezing, they can stay above freezing for over a month, as the sun never sets, and the melt-water pools start to form. Of the camera moves south into Fram Strait the final pictures sometimes show a nearing ice breaker, sent to rescue the camera.

I am thinking I might start a “Polar Camera Post”, with views from these cameras, as well as the four “O-buoy” cameras, plus some of my amazingly witty and lucid comments.

An elongated low north of Greenland is causing the winds, and bringing the mild air north.